Repairing Computers and (Re)producing Hierarchy: An Ethnography of Support Work and Organizational Status

• In Event: 082 - Open Refereed Roundtable Session I
  In Refereed Roundtable: A. Table 11. Ethnomethodology

Abstract

This paper discusses the lack of attention to university and college staff in writings on the marketization and rationalization of university administration. I argues that scholars’ lack of knowledge about the majority of its employees impoverishes our ability to understand the processes of the deprofessionalization of the professoriate discussed by organizational scholars of higher education. Relying on the example of IT (or computer) Support staffers, or the workers like secretaries and IT support that make professionals work possible, I show how changes in the organizational structure of higher education and are better understood by a view from below than focusing solely on faculty. I argue that support staff provide a view into the daily and interactional (re)production of the status hierarchy of the university as well as the process and effects of unpopular organizational change. The paper concludes with a discussion of how IT Support Staff function as both shock troops, or change agents in the implementation of administrative policy, and shock absorbers, or emotional laborers that incur employees’ displeasure at organizational changes and prevent them from being communicated to the administration.

Author

• Jessica Lotus Seeley, University of Michigan